Part 13 (1/2)
”That was where I was going.”
He disappeared. Rose got up and moved uneasily towards the window. ”How queer and quiet it looks outside. It's really too bad that he should be sent after that fan again. He'll never find it.” She resumed her place at the piano, Adele following her with round, expectant eyes. After a pause she started up again. ”I'll go and fetch it myself,” she said, with a half-embarra.s.sed laugh, and ran to the door.
Scarcely understanding her own nervousness, but finding relief in rapid movement, Rose flew lightly up the staircase. The major's study, where she had been writing letters, during his absence, that morning, was at the further end of a long pa.s.sage, and near her own bedroom, the door of which, as she pa.s.sed, she noticed, half-abstractedly, was open, but she continued on and hurriedly entered the study. At the same moment Emile, with a smile on his face, turned towards her with the fan in his hand.
”Oh, you've found it,” she said, with nervous eagerness. ”I was so afraid you'd have all your trouble for nothing.”
She extended her hand, with a half-breathless smile, for the fan, but he caught her outstretched little palm in his own, and held it.
”Ah! but you are not going to leave us, are you?”
In a flash of consciousness she understood him, and, as it seemed to her, her own nervousness, and all, and everything. And with it came a swift appreciation of all it meant to her and her future. To be always with him and like him, a part of this refined and restful seclusion--akin to all that had so attracted her in this house; not to be obliged to educate herself up to it, but to be in it on equal terms at once; to know that it was no wild, foolish youthful fancy, but a wise, thoughtful, and prudent resolve, that her father would understand and her friends respect: these were the thoughts that crowded quickly upon her, more like an explanation of her feelings than a revelation, in the brief second that he held her hand. It was not, perhaps, love as she had dreamed it, and even BELIEVED it, before. She was not ashamed or embarra.s.sed; she even felt, with a slight pride, that she was not blus.h.i.+ng. She raised her eyes frankly. What she WOULD have said she did not know, for the door, which he had closed behind her, began to shake violently.
It was not the fear of some angry intrusion or interference surely that made him drop her hand instantly. It was not--her second thought--the idea that some one had fallen in a fit against it that blanched his face with abject and unreasoning terror! It must have been something else that caused him to utter an inarticulate cry and dash out of the room and down the stairs like a madman! What had happened?
In her own self-possession she knew that all this was pa.s.sing rapidly, that it was not the door now that was still shaking, for it had swung almost shut again--but it was the windows, the book-shelves, the floor beneath her feet, that were all shaking. She heard a hurried scrambling, the trampling of feet below, and the quick rustling of a skirt in the pa.s.sage, as if some one had precipitately fled from her room. Yet no one had called to her--even HE had said nothing. Whatever had happened they clearly had not cared for her to know.
The jarring and rattling ceased as suddenly, but the house seemed silent and empty. She moved to the door, which had now swung open a few inches, but to her astonishment it was fixed in that position, and she could not pa.s.s. As yet she had been free from any personal fear, and even now it was with a half smile at her imprisonment in the major's study, that she rang the bell and turned to the window. A man, whom she recognized as one of the ranch laborers, was standing a hundred feet away in the garden, looking curiously at the house. He saw her face as she tried to raise the sash, uttered an exclamation, and ran forward. But before she could understand what he said, the sash began to rattle in her hand, the jarring recommenced, the floor shook beneath her feet, a hideous sound of grinding seemed to come from the walls, a thin seam of dust-like smoke broke from the ceiling, and with the noise of falling plaster a dozen books followed each other from the shelves, in what in the frantic hurry of that moment seemed a grimly deliberate succession; a picture hanging against the wall, to her dazed wonder, swung forward, and appeared to stand at right angles from it; she felt herself reeling against the furniture; a deadly nausea overtook her; as she glanced despairingly towards the window, the outlying fields beyond the garden seemed to be undulating like a sea. For the first time she raised her voice, not in fear, but in a pathetic little cry of apology for her awkwardness in tumbling about and not being able to grapple this new experience, and then she found herself near the door, which had once more swung free. She grasped it eagerly, and darted out of the study into the deserted pa.s.sage. Here some instinct made her follow the line of the wall, rather than the shaking bal.u.s.ters of the corridor and staircase, but before she reached the bottom she heard a shout, and the farm laborer she had seen coming towards her seized her by the arm, dragged her to the open doorway of the drawing-room, and halted beneath its arch in the wall. Another thrill, but lighter than before, pa.s.sed through the building, then all was still again.
”It's over; I reckon that's all just now,” said the man, coolly. ”It's quite safe to cut and run for the garden now, through this window.” He half led, half lifted her through the French window to the veranda and the ground, and locking her arm in his, ran quickly forward a hundred feet from the house, stopping at last beneath a large post oak where there was a rustic seat into which she sank. ”You're safe now, I reckon,” he said grimly.
She looked towards the house; the sun was s.h.i.+ning brightly; a cool breeze seemed to have sprung up as they ran. She could see a quant.i.ty of rubbish lying on the roof from which a dozen yards of zinc gutter were perilously hanging; the broken shafts of the further cl.u.s.ter of chimneys, a pile of bricks scattered upon the ground and among the battered down beams of the end of the veranda--but that was all. She lifted her now whitened face to the man, and with the apologetic smile still lingering on her lips, asked:--
”What does it all mean? What has happened?”
The man stared at her. ”D'ye mean to say ye don't know?”
”How could I? They must have all left the house as soon as it began. I was talking to--to M. l'Hommadieu, and he suddenly left.”
The man brought his face angrily down within an inch of her own. ”D'ye mean to say that them d----d French half-breeds stampeded and left yer there alone?”
She was still too much stupefied by the reaction to fully comprehend his meaning, and repeated feebly with her smile still faintly lingering: ”But you don't tell me WHAT it was?”
”An earthquake,” said the man, roughly, ”and if it had lasted ten seconds longer it would have shook the whole shanty down and left you under it. Yer kin tell that to them, if they don't know it, but from the way they made tracks to the fields, I reckon they did. They're coming now.”
Without another word he turned away half surlily, half defiantly, pa.s.sing scarce fifty yards away Mrs. Randolph and her daughter, who were hastening towards their guest.
”Oh, here you are!” said Mrs. Randolph, with the nearest approach to effusion that Rose had yet seen in her manner. ”We were wondering where you had run to, and were getting quite concerned. Emile was looking for you everywhere.”
The recollection of his blank and abject face, his vague outcry and blind fright, came back to Rose with a shock that sent a flash of sympathetic shame to her face. The ingenious Adele noticed it, and dutifully pinched her mother's arm.
”Emile?” echoed Rose faintly--”looking for ME?”
Mother and daughter exchanged glances.
”Yes,” said Mrs. Randolph, cheerfully, ”he says he started to run with you, but you got ahead and slipped out of the garden door--or something of the kind,” she added, with the air of making light of Rose's girlish fears. ”You know one scarcely knows what one does at such times, and it must have been frightfully strange to YOU--and he's been quite distracted, lest you should have wandered away. Adele, run and tell him Miss Mallory has been here under the oak all the time.”
Rose started--and then fell hopelessly back in her seat. Perhaps it WAS true! Perhaps he had not rushed off with that awful face and without a word. Perhaps she herself had been half-frightened out of her reason.
In the simple, weak kindness of her nature it seemed less dreadful to believe that the fault was partly her own.
”And you went back into the house to look for us when all was over,”